A Niantic executive said that he “could definitely see” governments and militaries purchasing the company’s newly announced AI model for navigating the real world, which would be based on scan data generated by Pokémon Go players, but that if the use case is specific to the military and “adding amplitude to war, then that’s definitely an issue.”
The comment was made by Brian McClendon, Niantic’s Senior Vice President of Engineering and formerly the co-creator of Google Earth, Street View, and Google Maps, at the investigative journalism group Bellingcat’s Bellingfest event on November 14. McClendon was giving a talk titled “Coordinates of tomorrow: Why spatial computing needs a new map,” which covered his history in the industry, his work at Google and Niantic, and some details on Niantic’s Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, that the company announced two days earlier.
During a questions and answers portion after his talk, Bellingcat’s open source analyst and ex-British Army officer Nick Waters said that LGMs would be “unbelievably useful” to the military and asked if McClendon could see governments and militaries purchase LGMs from Niantic.
“I could definitely see it,” McClendon said. “I think the question is would there be anything that they would do with it that would be outside of what a consumer or a Bellingcat want to do with it. If the use case is identical then that seems completely fine. If the use case is specific in military and adding amplitude to war then that’s obviously an issue.”
McClendon did not rule out selling Niantic’s data or LGM to governments and militaries.
“The LGM is an early stage project and is months or even years away from any kind of product," a Niantic spokesperson said when asked whether Niantic would consider selling its LGM or related data to governments and militaries. "Just like any kind of AI, there will be important questions that arise and we’ll tackle those responsibly and thoughtfully.”
As I wrote last week, Niantic named LGM as a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic’s LGM aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”
The data to train the LGM comes from Niantic’s games, including Pokémon Go. For example, Niantic recently introduced an experimental feature in Pokémon Go called Pokémon Playgrounds, where the user can place Pokémon at a specific location that will remain there for others to see and interact with. This feature, Niantic explains, is powered by massive amounts of data, and is unique because it is taken from a pedestrian perspective from locations inaccessible to cars.
"We use player-contributed scans of public real-world locations to help build our Large Geospatial Model,” Niantic said in a statement added to its blog about LGM after we first published our story about it last week. “This scanning feature is completely optional—people have to visit a specific publicly-accessible location and click to scan. This allows Niantic to deliver new types of AR experiences for people to enjoy. Merely walking around playing our games does not train an AI model."
Niantic’s LGM builds upon its Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS), which the company said has “10 million scanned locations around the world, and over 1 million of those are activated and available for use with our VPS service. We receive about 1 million fresh scans each week, each containing hundreds of discrete images.”
In the past, Niantic has incentivized Pokémon Go players for completing “AR mapping tasks,” giving them in-game rewards for scanning real world locations, though at the moment I’ve seen players complain that they are not going to take part in Pokémon Playgrounds because it doesn’t offer any rewards.
